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those must be heydays when the govt promised to ringfence 0.7% of national income , is that gdp(?) to foreign aid. i wonder what they were thinking of.

but today we get this really strange anomaly of finding things to spend it on, when the rest of the country have austerity imposed on them. so the daily mail set up a petition to call on the govt to scrap that. and i signed it, and it seems it has reached 100,000 which means the govt have to debate it… maybe it might be overturned , because it seems crazy to give so much money to it that they cannot find enough to spend it on.

The choice of recipients has often proven unwise. For example, Britain is the second largest bilateral aid donor to Tanzania, where the opposition recently boycotted an election on the island of Zanzibar. Today we report that the US, which has a commitment to democracy as a precondition to an aid programme to the country, announced that it would be withdrawing £331 million of development funds in protest at Tanzania’s authoritarian turn. Britain, by contrast, has made no indication that its assistance will stop. This is typical. Last year, Paul Kagame, the president of Rwanda, rewrote his nation’s constitution to keep himself in power. Dfid carried on as normal.